Amid the GDP growth targets, the CPECs, and the budget allocations, its important to remember a more salient matter of this developing economy - one that isn't as much a part of the national dialogue as it should be: Education. Never mind the lack of prioritization, the unavailability of reliable data itself should be enough to deter any potential policymaking decisions (not that there are any in sight).

The good people of Alif Ailaan - an Islamabad-based NGO working for the promotion of education in Pakistan - launched their annual District Education Rankings last week. The report seeks to identify the state of education in 151 districts of Pakistan and represents the most comprehensive and up-to-date compilation of quantitative data available at present. And even then, there are sizeable holes in the data.

First, a little bit about the rankings and their methodology: There are two types of rankings - education outcome and infrastructure. Each has a number of sub-indices, which are given equal weightage. Education outcome takes into account enrolment, learning (test scores), retention (survival rates up till 5th grade, and gender parity. Infrastructure - or educational inputs - looks at boundary walls, drinking water, electricity, toilet, and satisfactory building condition.

Second, the findings: Each dataset is worthy of a discussion of its own, so this column will not attempt to make any summaries (the tables are given for this reason). Just a couple of major points - only 52 percent of all government schools in the country have all four infrastructure facilities (i.e. toilets, boundary walls, running electricity and drinking water); and a staggering 81 percent of all government schools are primary schools. This implies that after primary education, children in Pakistan have very limited opportunities to continue their education.

Third, the limitations: Alif Ailaan primarily relies on data from the PSLM, NEMIS, and ASER. The PSLM (Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement) conducts door-to-door surveys in four provinces, thus offering a more representative sample in terms of public and private schools. NEMIS is the National Education Management Information System, and collects data directly from government schools. Finally, ASER is a citizen-led non-profit that collects data from households in all territories, thus being the most representative. However, each has its limitations and there are huge differences in the findings.

ASER, while used as a reliable source, can be criticized for being volunteer-based at the end of the day and not being as rigorous as its government counterpart. Meanwhile, NEMIS accounts for just government schools and fails to account for the entire private sector, which forms some 38 percent of schools being attended. And PSLM, as mentioned earlier, does not paint a complete picture as it does not take into account FATA, GB, or AJK.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. The main issue is that there are little to no qualitative measures. For instance, whether a school has electricity or not is a simple yes or no question, without accounting for how many hours the electricity is available, how many classrooms it goes to, etc. Similarly, while the availability of a toilet or drinking water can also be answered in yes or no terms, there is no consideration as to how many students are using the same toilet, what is the quality of that toilet, is the drinking water sufficient for all the children, is it hygienic enough, etc. This binary approach cannot paint an accurate enough picture.

It gets worse when we move away from infrastructure and towards education outcomes. Apart from test scores, there is no way to gauge the quality of education being imparted onto students. There is absolutely no data available on a child's school experience, or the quality of teaching. The Punjab Education Commission launched standardized exams for grade 5 students to this end, but the onus of conducting the test lay with the schools teachers, who would intervene and beef up the scores to make their results look better.

Recently, the Punjab government started monthly monitoring of grade 3 students, selecting students randomly for tests. This has been in the pilot phase since last year but the data for this is not available. KP is working with a similar system as well, but this too is in the pilot phase.

Another big issue is that of ghost schools and ghost teachers. There hasn't been any authentic study or survey on the number of ghost schools in the country, save for a survey by the Supreme Court in 2013. The SC survey found that there are 6,164 non-functional and ghost schools in Sindh, compared to 8,252 in Pakistan. Since this survey was not carried out in all districts, and some did not provide the numeric reporting, this is an underestimate of the actual number of ghost schools. As for ghost teachers, the scope of the problem is uncertain as there is no data available. However, it isn't unlikely that many government school teachers draw salaries from the education department without being involved in teaching.

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At a time when each industry is clamouring for its share at the onset of the FY17 budget, holding up un-kept promises from the year thats (almost) passed, let the advocates of education make their demand known as well: Finance Minister Ishaq Dar promised to allocate 4 percent of GDP to education by 2018. The budgetary allocations of the federal and the provincial did indicate an increment from 2.62 percent of GDP in FY15 to 2.68 percent for FY16 - a nominal increase. However, while the data is not available yet, given the lower PSDP spending this year, its likely that this 2.68 percent will turn out to be an overstatement.

Education needs to be made a bigger part of the national agenda. The promised amount needs to be delivered and equally importantly, there needs to be better research to fill in the data voids. Reports like Alif Ailaans, while very welcome, can only paint an abstract picture based on the available data. Hopefully, the census shall help out to this end.

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